"Wren…" Corinn exhaled. Dariel's concubine. Pregnant and growing plumper every day. Though Corinn avoided speaking to her, she caught glimpses of the girl often enough. Her narrow eyes always seemed to be waiting for Corinn, fixed on her before she had realized they were going to make eye contact. She was pretty, indeed. A northern Candovian. One of those slim, athletic women upon whom a baby is but a shapely bump that adds to her attractiveness, a moon to be caressed. "I can't see her now. She'd likely ask me to acknowledge her child as Dariel's."
"It is Dariel's."
"Yes, but I'm not at all sure that I want to declare that right now. Tell her I'm too busy. If she likes, she could retire to Calfa Ven. I'll send physicians. She could have the baby there, in peaceful seclusion."
"I already felt her out about that, Your Majesty. She would rather be here in the palace."
"Fine," Corinn said a little coldly, as she wanted to close the subject, "but she'll have to wait for an audience."
Rhrenna nodded and noted this on her documents. Watching her down-tilted face, Corinn remembered that she once thought Meinish women uniformly bland of appearance. Too pale, thin-skinned, with finely drawn features that had a coldness in keeping with their frigid nation. At the time she had thought it ironic considering that the men of the same race had been striking, especially Hanish… Looking at Rhrenna now, she realized that her feelings about Meinish women had never been accurate. Yes, their features were as described, but they had their own style of beauty. What had kept her from seeing it was jealousy. Fear that Hanish might one day choose one of his own over her.
Forgetting the annoyance of a moment before, Corinn acknowledged a very different emotion instead. "Rhrenna, I'm sorry."
The secretary looked up and studied her. "For what?"
Was this folly? To admit a crime and wish it otherwise? No, she did not think so. "For what I did to your people."
"Oh." Rhrenna cleared her throat, looked back at the documents. "We weren't innocents."
"I know. You knew all the time, didn't you? All the time that we rode together and I showed you the ways of court and we were young together-all through that time you knew that Hanish might one day sacrifice me to the Tunishnevre."
Rhrenna drew in on herself. She pulled her gaze in, head down as she stared at the papers on her lap. Her blond hair fell around her. "I never wanted that to happen."
"But you knew it might. I'm not chastising you. You are closer to me now than my sister is. Perhaps I love the blood you share with Hanish. Maybe that's why I feel so close to you. For some reason, I know that the fact that you would have betrayed me then means that you won't now. Or ever again. Am I right?"
The young woman's head bobbed. "You are right."
"I know it," Corinn said. She folded her hands in her lap and inhaled a long breath. Something about doing so made her feel she had sucked in Rhrenna's promise and owned it. "When this is over and we're at peace again, I will lift the ban on entering Mein Tahalian. There's no reason it shouldn't be opened again, lived in again. There's every reason it should, actually. If I did that, would it please you?"
Rhrenna sat as if she were still studying the pages before her, but her gaze had drifted off slightly, unfocused. "I don't think I could live there again. Maybe if I lived to old age I'd return, but I'm not sure. I think some others would, though. I know some want that very much. It wouldn't be the same, of course. There are too few of us left, but I know some Mein who would take their families back to Tahalian. Even their mixed families. They'd pry off the beams that seal it, open the steam valves, and heat the place. It could never be the same, but it would be good for life to fill the place again. I would like to believe that an entire culture can't just be forgotten."
This time it was Corinn who took a while to respond. Though she had begun the conversation, it surprised Corinn to realize that Rhrenna had truly thought about this before. She had even spoken to other Mein about it. A culture forgotten? What a strange idea. To Corinn it had always been the opposite. She had feared the world would remember the Mein too well, feared that they might yet have some power, some way to shape the world. Hanish so often haunted her thoughts. How could he not when he so clearly lived on in Aaden? The Mein-in her own mind, at least-were far from being forgotten. That had seemed a problem before. Now, however, she sometimes wished she had not ordered Hanish killed. Perhaps there could have been some way for them to live together. What a powerful pair they would have been! Rulers for the ages.
Outside, a bone whistle announced the advancing hour. Other flutists and pipers picked up the melody and spread it down from the palace toward the lower town. Corinn listened until the music faded into the distance, reminded by it just how tired she was. "Rhrenna," she said, "I am not going to destroy it all. You believe that, don't you?"
The answer came back to her with welcome speed. "Yes, Your Majesty, I believe that."
That night, after visiting Aaden and singing healing into his sleeping form, Corinn tried to dream travel again. She waited even later than the night previous, and she aimed for a different target this time. Dariel might not be reachable. Maybe dead, or perhaps the connection would never snap tight between them. She tried not to think too much about it. Think only until you know what to do. Then act. This time, when her spirit lifted and pulled free of the shell of her body and began the long flight through the dark night, it was another man's name she screamed out before her, racing behind it. This one, surprisingly easily, she found.
Her feet did not exactly touch the floor in the room, but she did reach stillness at the foot of a sleeping man's bed. His face was hidden beneath a cushion, his arms thrown wide. He looked like a man recently suffocated, but the nasal grinding of his breathing testified to his continued life.
"Wake," she said.
A form rolled in the sheets and then settled, still again. Nothing more.
"Wake!"
Corinn instilled all her will in the command, and this time a shape pulled away from the physical form hidden beneath the blankets. She could not have said whether the image was clothed or naked-no more than she could have detailed the same about herself. He simply was as he was. Many details of his form blurred, were unsteady, or translucent. At the same time, other identifying features showed clear. Thin shoulders. Bewildered. Muffled and ill at ease in a way that would have been expressed by disheveled hair on a physical body but was now a part of the impression of the spirit. His face, droopy and dull eyed, was just as she remembered, just as gape mouthed. How bizarre that she could reach around the world in spirit form and still find Rialus Neptos to be… well, Rialus Neptos.
"Queen Corinn?" he asked.
She did not answer. She looked around the room. She could not have said what she would have expected, but a grand bed was not part of it. Nor a chamber with finely constructed furniture, wall hangings, rugs so thick they must suck at the toes of one walking across them. Rialus had no finer quarters in Acacia!
Her eyes settled back on him. "This I find very strange," she said.
His head snapped around from side to side, taking in the same sights she just had at double the speed. "This is-ah-difficult to explain."
Corinn wanted to ask him to do so, but she knew her connection with him could not last long. She already felt the fatigue of being so far from her body. Felt the pull back toward it, and knew that it would grow stronger with each passing moment. And she knew somehow that she was in danger like this. If anything-or anybody-snipped the long thread that connected her to her corporeal self, she could be lost forever. Dead, even if her body lived for a time in a long sleep.